Mormon Row in Winter
Returning for the first time since 2011 to photograph the Moulton Barns was everything I expected it would be. I had done a little looking into how I could access this place in winter and went to buy my first pair of snowshoes. Grand Teton National Park is a beautiful place in winter and though not one of the bigger National Parks because the park service keeps only few of the roads plowed in winter it can become quite spread out with entering from different sides of town; one entrance near the airport outside of Jackson and one near Teton Village. I found this the hard way as the first day I was in the park on this trip I snow shoed for miles and never came close to finding the barns! As I talked with a backcountry skier late in that first day I got clear directions to Mormon Row.
The T. A. Moulton Barn is all that remains of the homestead built by Thomas Alma Moulton and his sons between about 1912 and 1945. It sits west of the road known as Mormon Row, in an area called Antelope Flats, between the towns of Kelly and Moose. Now lying within Grand Teton National Park, it is near the homestead of Andy Chambers. The property with the barn was one of the last parcels sold to the National Park Service by the Moulton family. Leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or Mormons, sent parties from the Salt Lake Valley to establish new communities and support their expanding population. Mormon homesteaders, who settled east of Blacktail Butte near the turn of the 19-century, clustered their farms to share labor and community, a stark contrast with the isolation typical of many western homesteads. These settlers first arrived in the 1890s from Idaho establishing a community (named Grovont by the U.S. Post Office) known today as “Mormon Row.”
My new snowshoes proved invaluable, without them there would have been no way I would have made it out to these barns. Antelope Flat is a massive open space and I photographed a solitary tree here before heading out to T.A. Mouton’s Barn. Although it was in the low 20’s with a roaring wind I stayed and photographed all day. Watching the changes in the clouds over the Teton Range and the sky turn blue and then gray again was like a kid getting a treat! During the day it snowed and hailed small pellets, at one point I decided to warm up by hiking around the barn and sheltering inside careful not to leave tracks in front of the barn and ruining any chance to photograph more later in the day. As the sun set I packed my gear and headed back to the car, I was the only person all day at Mormon Row on February 7, 2015. To photograph and spend a day in solitude in this place was not only special but also a day I will always remember!